Moneyball by Lewis, Michael (mobile ebook reader txt) 📕

develop. By the time it has, it’s too late for him to cover first base. The bases are now loaded, with nobody out. Another roll of toilet paper streams from the bleachers into center field. The crowd is on its feet, making more noise than ever, still thinking, Lord knows why, that their attention is what Chad Bradford needs to get him through his troubles.

Billy stares at the television with disgust, like a theatre critic being forced to watch a mangled interpretation of Hamlet. “I can’t believe I have to sit here and watch this shit,” he says. He pulls his little white box onto the desk in front of him. Its plastic shine has been rubbed dull. “I would be dying right now if I was walking around watching this,” he says. He’s fantasizing: if I hadn’t trapped him with the TV inside this office he would be out in the parking lot, marching around glancing every five seconds at the white box. He’d rather be dying out there than whatever he’s doing in here.

The next batter, Luis Ordaz, is the one who makes good on Billy’s prediction about Miguel Tejada (“Watch him: he’ll try to do more than he should”). Ordaz hits a routine ground ball to Tejada’s right. Instead of making the routine play, the force at third, Tejada tries to make the acrobatic one, the force at home. His leaping throw bounces in the dirt in front of Ramon Hernandez and all runners are safe: 11-6. Bases still loaded, nobody yet out.

Art Howe virtually leaps out of the dugout to yank Chad from the game. On his way to his seat on the bench Chad stares at the ground, and works to remain expressionless. He came in with a six-run lead. He leaves with the tying run in the on-deck circle. The ball never left the infield.

“Jesus Christ, what a fucking embarrassment,” says Billy. He reaches under the desk and extracts a canister of Copenhagen. He jams the chaw into his upper lip. “Why am I even watching this shit?”

The new pitcher, Ricardo Rincon, gets two quick outs, and gives up just one run on a sacrifice fly: 11-7. With two outs and runners on first and third, Art Howe walks out yet again. This time he calls for right-hander Jeff Tam, newly arrived from Triple-A, to face the right-handed Mike Sweeney, who is, at the moment, leading the American League in hitting.

“Fuck,” says Billy. “Why? They all take this lefty-righty shit too far. What’s wrong with leaving Rincon in?”

Tam had two years in the A’s bullpen where he played the role now played by Chad Bradford. There was a time when Ron Washington, the infield coach, took to calling Tam “Toilet Paper” (“Because he’s always cleanin’ up everybody else’s shit”). But something happened, either in Tam’s head or his delivery, and for the past two years he hasn’t been the same guy. “Relievers are like volatile stocks,” Billy says. “They’re the one asset you need to watch closely, and trade for quick profits.”

As his manager and reliever confer, Billy Beane looks at me apologetically. In under forty-five minutes he’s passed from detachment to interest, from interest to irritation, from irritation to anger, and is now, obviously, on the brink of rage. He’s embarrassed by his emotions but not enough to control them. “All right,” he finally says, “you’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to have to pace around here.”

With that, he walks out into the clubhouse, closing the door behind him, and begins to storm around. Past the trainer’s room where poor Tim Hudson, who must be wondering what he needs to do to get a win, is having heat applied to his shoulder. Past Scott Hatteberg and Greg Myers, the two lefties on the bench who had thought they had the night off, rushing back through the clubhouse to the batting cage to take some practice swings, in case they are asked to pinch-hit. And, finally, past the video room where Paul DePodesta stews on the improbability of the evening. Paul already has calculated the odds of winning twenty games in a row. (He puts them at fourteen in a million.) Now he’s calculating the odds of losing an eleven-run lead. (“It may not be fourteen in a million but it’s close.”)

In his 1983 Abstract, Bill James had contemplated tonight’s game. James had observed in baseball what he called a “law of competitive balance.” “There exists in the world a negative momentum,” he wrote,

which acts constantly to reduce the differences between strong teams and weak teams, teams which are ahead and teams which are behind, or good players and poor players. The corollaries are:

Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.

The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind.

Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards.

More metaphysics than physics, it was as true of people as it was of baseball teams. People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don’t. That very desire, tantamount to a need, is also a weakness. In Billy Beane, the trait is so pronounced that it is not merely a weakness. It is a curse.

When play resumes, Jeff Tam and Mike Sweeney fight a great battle. On the tenth pitch of the at bat, after fouling off four pitches with Superman swings, Sweeney takes a slider from Tam and golfs it off the 1-800-BAR-NONE sign, just over the left field wall.

11-10.

Something big crashes in the clubhouse.

On the TV over Art Howe’s desk, Art himself is again on his way to the mound, to replace Jeff Tam with a lefty named Micah Bowie. Mike Sweeney enthusiastically explains to his teammates in the Kansas City dugout how he thought his home run was a foul ball. The announcers say what a